psychology

#594 James Salzman - Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

Mar 3, 2022

Dr. James Salzman is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law with joint appointments at the UCLA School of Law and at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. In twelve books and more than 100 articles and book chapters, his broad-ranging scholarship has addressed topics spanning drinking water, trade and environment conflicts, ownership engineering, and creating markets for ecosystem services. He is the author of Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. More»
#593 Brian Boyd - On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction

Feb 28, 2022

Dr. Brian Boyd is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is the author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. More»
#591 John Petrocelli - The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

Feb 24, 2022

Dr. John Petrocelli is Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. He is a social psychologist and his research involves experimental social cognition and judgment and decision making. His specific research interests include attitude strength and persuasion, bullshitting, counterfactual thinking and metacognition. He is the author of The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit. More»
#590 Thomas Costello: Authoritarianism on the Right and the Left, and Sexual Objectification

Feb 21, 2022

Thomas Costello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University. Certain personality traits, thinking styles, and worldviews give rise to maladaptive political attitudes and behaviors, such as violence, extreme partisanship, and authoritarianism. Thomas’ research leverages the tools and expertise of personality psychology and clinical science to understand, measure, and statistically model the psychological causes and correlates of these attitudes and behaviors. More»
#589 Ashley Thomas: Naïve Sociology, and How Children Think About Hierarchies and Social Relations

Feb 18, 2022

Dr. Ashley Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the center for research on open and equitable scholarship at MIT. She is interested in humans as a social species. She investigates what infants, toddlers, and children think about social relationships (i.e., their naive sociology). She has studied how they think and feel about social hierarchy (i.e. situations where there is a 'winner' and a 'loser' or when someone is 'in charge.'). Currently, she is working with Elizabeth Spelke and Rebecca Saxe, and they are investigating how infants interpret social interactions that involve their own caregivers as well as how infants, toddlers, and children think about social intimacy. She has also studied people's moral judgments of parenting decisions. More»
#585 Philippe Rochat Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White

Feb 10, 2022

Dr. Philippe Rochat is Professor of Psychology at Emory University. What is the nature and origins of human self-conscious psychology? Driven by this question, the main focus of Dr. Rochat's research in the Emory Infant and Child Lab is on the early sense of self, emerging self-concept, the development of social cognition and relatedness, and the emergence of a moral sense during the preschool years in children from all over the world growing up in different cultural environments and socio-economic circumstances. Dr. Rochat has published five books, including Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White. More»
#583 Peter Ditto: Motivated Reasoning, Morality, and Politics

Feb 4, 2022

Dr. Peter Ditto is Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine School of Social Ecology. He is interested in “hot cognition” — the interface between passion and reason. His research examines the role of motivation, emotion and intuition in social, political, moral, medical, and legal judgment. Most generally, he has sought to explain the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” — how the desire to reach a particular conclusion biases the processing of information related to that conclusion. His early work examined the role such biases play in responses to threatening medical information (e.g., denial). More recently, his work has focused on motivated moral reasoning, particularly how people selectively recruit general principles and factual beliefs to support desired moral conclusions. Another key focus of his current research is partisan political bias. This work examines the multiple ways that political ideology biases our political judgments and behavior. Finally, he is interested in a variety of psychological issues involved in end-of-life medical decision making. More»
#581 Robert Larzelere: Parenting Styles, Authoritative Parenting, and Spanking

Jan 31, 2022

Dr. Robert Larzelere is Professor and Research Methodologist in the College of Education and Human Sciences at Oklahoma State University. He is interested in collaborating with others who are concerned about the best scientific evidence on important questions about family and family-type relationships. He investigates specific disciplinary processes that account for the effectiveness of the authoritative parenting combination of warmth, communication, just-firm-enough control and increasing autonomy. He is interested in comparing the effectiveness of alternative disciplinary responses to misbehavior and searching for alternative tactics that are more effective than non-abusive spanking in situations where the latter has traditionally been used. More»
#580 Emily Kubin: Political Polarization, Dehumanization, and the Media

Jan 28, 2022

Emily Kubin is a PhD student in the Political Psychology & Communication Lab at the University of Koblenz-Landau (at Landau). She studies political communication. Specifically, she focuses on how political opponents view and interact with one another, and the role media play in opponents’ perceptions of one another. She places a special focus on studying strategies political opponents (and the media) can use to reduce affective polarization. More»
#579 Valerie Hardcastle: The Self, Consciousness, Pain, and Abnormal Psychology

Jan 27, 2022

Dr. Valerie Hardcastle is St. Elizabeth Healthcare Executive Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Vice President for Health Innovation at Northern Kentucky University. Dr. Hardcastle specializes in philosophy of neuroscience/biology, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophical implications of psychiatry. She researches bioethics/neuroethics, behavioral neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. She teaches metaphysics, science studies, feminist philosophy of science. She is the author of several books, including Locating Consciousness, The Myth of Pain, and Constructing the Self. More»